They are the words every parent fears. “Your child has a brain tumor.” The child in question was my four-year-old nephew, and the words were spoken just a few weeks ago. The summer of 2011 has passed in a whirl of MRIs, surgery, radiation and chemo, along with learning the new vocabulary of medulloblastoma, Hickman lines, and posterior fossa.
And we are learning a new vocabulary of faith. The classic question you are expected to ask at time like this is “Why, God? Why do you allow suffering?” And the classic answer of Christian theology is that suffering comes of living in a fallen world. It is inevitable in a world tainted by evil. It’s a simple matter of consequences.
But when it’s you who are suffering, or perhaps even harder, someone close to you, the questions are personalized, and we ask them not only of God, but of ourselves. “Why this child?” “Why did he get a tumor?” And “Why is his treatable, but other children in the hospital are dying?”
The generic answer doesn’t help: it doesn’t deal with the specific. Nor does scripture help a great deal. In John 9, Jesus’ disciples asked him whose fault was it that a man was born blind. He said, “No-one’s.” And then he healed the man.
We don’t have answers to the questions we want to ask, or at least, not answers we like. But what we do have is a lifetime of faith. And it is my nephew who has led us in drawing on that faith. He is the one who wrote a prayer “Dear God, please make me better. Amen” on a piece of paper, rolled it up tightly, and pushed it into a crack in the wall of a 1400 year old church (he also wrote a prayer asking for the big Lego pyramid!). He is the one who each day at the park, runs up to a large Victorian drinking fountain, puts his hands in the bowl of water, and prays “Thank you God for making me better, and thank you for making all the other sick children better too..” He greets every new experience with unfailing curiosity, and a large measure of faith.
His thick hair might be almost gone, his bones beginning to show, but his faith in God is strong and secure. Even when nothing makes sense, my nephew reminds me that God can be trusted.
